Regenerative Artivism

This episode turns to Japanese artist Tomiyama Taeko, whose century-long life and artistic practice confronted the unresolved histories of Japanese empire, war responsibility, colonial violence, forced labor, military sexual slavery, and postwar denial. Beginning with her youth in Dalian and Harbin in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, the episode traces how Tomiyama transformed personal memory into a...

Season 3 of Regenerative Artivism moves from the Greater China region to Japan and Korea, following the podcast’s concerns into a historical terrain shaped by empire, war, militarization, state violence, disaster memory, and feminist refusal. This prologue introduces the season’s central idea: bodies of resistance. Across the season, the body appears not only as a site of protest, but also as arch...

In this season finale, I return to the guiding question of season 2: what makes regenerative work last? Across six episodes set in northern Taiwan, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Macau, and Quanzhou, we followed women who build the social, cultural, and institutional conditions that allow creative practice to endure. Their work took the form of an ecological residency, a neighborhood mutual-aid spa...

This episode follows a familiar feeling that many heritage streets now produce: the moment when a place shifts from lived neighborhood to curated backdrop. In Quanzhou’s West Street（Xijie，西街）, that shift is intensified by heritage recognition, tourism, and the fast circulation of images.  We explore this question through the work of Zheng Dazhen 郑达真, a cultural producer and curator who has...

In this episode, I introduce Dai Biyun 戴碧筠, also known as Debbie Tai, a Macau theatre-maker and the co-founder, resident choreographer, and artistic director of Zero Distance Cooperative (ZDC, 零距離合作社). Working in a casino city shaped by speed, shift labor, and constant tourist traffic, Tai uses playback theatre to build something rare and necessary: a durable practice of public listening,...

This episode follows curator and public-program organizer Liu Yang (刘阳) into Huangbian Village (黄边村), an urban village in Guangzhou. Set beside Guangdong Times Museum (广东时代美术馆), a contemporary art museum embedded in a residential complex, Liu’s work unfolds across two scales at once: the architectural institution above, and the lane-level commons below. The episode focuses on two adjac...

In this episode, I stay with the Beijing-based curator and producer Ge Huichao 葛慧超, also known as Dew Ge, the founder of Body On&On (身身不息). The episode frames her work through a simple but consequential proposition: access is not an add-on to art, but a craft that shapes how public culture is made. Read through the lens of regenerative aesthetics, access becomes an aesthetic practice of...

In this episode, we follow Shanghai-based curator and organizer Chen Yun 陈韵 and ask what happens when curating stops being an exhibition format and becomes a way of living with neighbors under demolition pressure. The story begins in Dinghaiqiao 定海桥, a working-class neighborhood shaped by redevelopment, where Chen and collaborators turned a modest rented apartment into the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-...

Hsiao Li-Hung (蕭麗虹), also known as Margaret Hsiao, built one of Taiwan’s most influential platforms for socially engaged and ecological art by starting with what was available: a repurposed chicken coop on the river’s edge in Zhuwei, near the Tamsui River system. This episode traces how Bamboo Curtain Studio (竹圍工作室) grew from a making-centered ceramics site into a porous cultural commons—o...

In this short prologue for Season 2 of Regenerative Artivism, I introduce the guiding question for Season 2: what makes regenerative artivism last. Staying in the Greater China region, the season shifts from landscapes of repair to the infrastructures that make care and creativity durable over time. Infrastructures here does not mean only highways and dams. It means enabling conditions: residencie...

Season 2 of Regenerative Artivism follows Asian women artists, curators, and community organizers working across the Greater China region to build the social and cultural infrastructures that make care and creativity durable. This trailer previews six episodes that move from northern Taiwan to Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Macau, and Quanzhou, tracing how regenerative practice takes shape through...

In this short season finale, I reflect on what season 1 has been doing at its core: practicing a slower, more accountable way of paying attention. Rather than chasing crisis headlines, the season lingered with place-based creative work that often hides in plain sight, in classrooms, farms, creeks, kitchens, improvised studios, and everyday gathering spaces. Across these sites, regenerative artivis...

Summary Episode 6 follows the practice of Aluaiy Kaumakan, also known in Chinese as Wu Yuling (武玉玲), a Paiwan (排灣) textile and installation artist from southern Taiwan, and asks how weaving can become a method of cultural survival after climate disaster and forced relocation. Moving between community-based making and large-scale installation, this episode stays close to the material intellige...

Summary This episode follows the Shanghai-based artist Song Chen (宋陈), whose practice treats soil not simply as an environmental theme but as a medium, a witness, and a moral problem. Beginning from the premise that urban life is designed to keep soil out of sight, the episode asks what it means to build modern comfort on damaged ground. Song’s early earth-based works, including Dust to Dust and...

Summary In this episode, we travel through South China’s river deltas and mountain headwaters around Guangzhou to follow the practice of Chen Xiaoyang (陈晓阳), an artist, visual anthropologist, and museum leader whose work treats art as fieldwork and public method. Moving from an urban village in Guangzhou to a headwater village in a protected water-source area, Chen’s projects show how exhibitio...

This episode of regenerative artivism travels to Hong Kong, one of the most densely built cities on earth, to spend time with the practice of artist and ecological practitioner Lo Lai Lai Natalie （劳丽丽）. Working between small farms on the urban fringe, fishpond landscapes in the New Territories, and multi-channel video installations, Lo lives what she calls a half farming, half X life that fus...

In this episode, we follow Chinese artist and educator Wang Fangfang (王芳芳) from the artist village of Songzhuang on the outskirts of Beijing back to the loess hills of her home region in northern Shaanxi, and onward to the headwaters of the Yangtze River on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau. After an early career inside the capital’s contemporary art circuit, Wang made the deliberate decision to leav...

In this introductory episode, I lay out the core idea of regenerative artivism and the scope of the podcast. Speaking from southern California with my attention grounded in East Asia, I reflect on how art, care, and collective imagination help communities confront social and environmental injustice and craft/cultivate more livable futures in damaged places. Using the image of a threatened valley a...

This episode introduces the practice of Taiwanese artist Wu Mali （吳瑪悧）as an early anchor for regenerative artivism in East Asia. Moving from a polluted suburban creek at the edge of Taipei to river basins, a former naval kitchen on Cijin Island, and finally a project focused on one cubic centimeter of soil, the episode traces how Wu treats art as environmental infrastructure rather than isola...

This trailer introduces regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. I am your host, Meiqin Wang, an art historian working in contemporary Asian art and the environmental humanities. In this podcast, I explore how Asian women artists, curators, and community organizers use creative, place-based practice to confront social and environmental injustice a...